A veteran's view on marketing games

A bit of marketing fun

A huge problem in the app marketplace is gaining visibility. Many hundreds of new apps are released every day, all vying for the attention of journalists and the public. It is immensely difficult to get your app noticed at all. If you go to the forums where the indie developers hang out you can see that this is their biggest problem. As Oscar Wilde said, there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.

There are two ways out of this that are commonly used, one is to throw money at the problem, to buy visibility. We don’t really want to do this at Kwalee if we can help it. The other is to cross promote between a catalog of existing apps on the app store. But Kwalee only has one app out there, Gobang Social.

Gobang Social is a great fun game to play with your Facebook friends. We developed it as a technology demonstrator, to prove that we could do many different things that are involved in developing and publishing an app. Also as the testbed to create our turn based server technology. This simple, fun game was ideal for the task and enabled us to climb all sorts of learning curves.

However we do need to have players using the game in order to test and develop what we are doing. So we need to do some marketing to attract these people. And as we already know, this is difficult in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Our solution was to create a really wacky video and to incorporate a competition. In marketing terms this was very inexpensive indeed. And it has worked, it has done exactly the job it was intended to do. Not only that, the staff had a great fun day out. And we continued to build our brand image as a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously and which has a laugh.

And just for good measure, here is the product video for Gobang Social, so you can see what our game looks like: